In the art educational therapy (AET) method introduced in this article, school coursework is integrated into art therapy with the aim of facilitating such learning and enhancing the emotional well-being of children with learning difficulties who have experienced stress or trauma. A grounded theory research study based on the cases of 5 middle school children identified "writing-images" in which children experiment with drawn forms of letters and numbers prior to learning to read. Opportunities to work with writing-images in AET enable the child to reclaim the learning potential of an early developmental "writing-image" phase. (Contains 7 figures, 1 footnote and 1 table.)